The Internet and computer networks have given people and organizations increased access to an abundance of information. However, the large amount of information available has made it difficult to quickly and effectively find targeted information. Even searching a limited number of internal databases on a single network can be a long and difficult task without a proper searching method.
Two main searching methods are known: recall searching and precision searching. Recall searching, used by the vast majority of Internet search engines, has the goal of bringing back as much information as necessary to ensure that the targeted information is included. As a result, recall searching often returns far too much information, forcing the user to sift through a large amount of irrelevant search results before finding the targeted information.
Precision searching, on the other hand, has the goal of bringing back a smaller number of documents while maintaining a higher probability that the targeted information is included in the search results. However, many precision search algorithms do not effectively use a user's search request and the search results, and therefore do not successfully and efficiently return the most relevant search materials.